How do we get to The Top of the CRC Energy Efficiency League Table? No company wants to be portrayed as a dangerous polluter. Such connotations can lead to lower share pricing, lost sales and damaged credibility, and can be a public relations nightmare to smooth over.

Conversely, giving your company a healthy green glow can lead to a strong boost in the affections of consumers, clients and policy-makers. Each year, the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme will publish a giant League Table on the carbon-cutting performance of participating companies. Media outlets will dissect the list into sector-specific league tables, leaving little shelter for your company to hide from the enquiring gaze of journalists, bloggers and the public.

Three metrics will determine your placement in the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme League Table: early action, absolute emissions and growth. Whilst the first couple of years’ League Tables will be dominated by companies which secured a high early action bonus, it is the absolute emission metric - the percentage change in your company’s carbon emissions versus a five-year rolling average - which will eventually make up 75% of the points for the League Table.

Don’t get sidetracked by playing the CRC league system and worry about making gains early: let the Law of Diminishing Returns work in your favour for once! As you reduce your corporate carbon footprint, the amount that you have to reduce by each year to obtain the same relative, reduces.

What’s more, because the percentage is calculated against a five-year rolling average which doesn’t exist before the start of the scheme, the early performance percentages are magnified by the greater weighting on the initial years whilst the rolling average grows.

Year

Reqd % cut to maintain 25% reduction target vs. original emissions

						Early Action (no prior data)		Late Action (5-year uniform data)
1						25		25
2						9.38		3.75
3						5.47		4.31
4						3.76		4.96
5						2.82		5.7

For example, cutting your company’s carbon footprint by 25% every year against an accumulating five-year rolling average allows you to cut your emissions by only 46% over the first five years, with the fifth year of cuts requiring only a 2.8% cut against your original carbon footprint. If reductions were calculated year-on-year, the same 25% cuts every year for five years would require an absolute reduction of 76%! Leaving it until the five-year average has accumulated makes it easier to achieve the same cuts for the second year, but then it becomes harder across the following three years.

That means that energy efficiency gains made right now will help your company climb the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme League Table not just now but far into the future too. Efficiency gains now will also help you achieve a better growth metric too through the same mechanism. Efficiency projects aimed at reducing your fixed energy costs are most effective towards this metric during a recession, whilst process/manufacturing-related projects will scale well with the growth metric as your company emerges from recession.

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